Thread by @GoodLawProject

🚨 Day 2 of our High Court hearing over the PPE procurement scandal has begun 🚨

Starting with Ayanda - the hedge fund with political connections awarded £252 million worth of contracts and put through the 'VIP Lane'. THREAD ⬇️standard.co.uk/news/uk/ayanda…

The contract with Ayanda resulted from communications from Mr Mills, a former advisor to the Department for International Trade. Their allocation to the VIP lane worked as follows:

As soon as Ayanda was allocated to the VIP lane, an individual pseudonymised as “1U” put pressure on an official to deal with it as quickly as possible: “This is likely to get escalated to Ministerial level in next 20 mins or so.”

Another important feature of the more favourable treatment given to VIPs over other businesses is that they were actively approached to see if they could offer things.

Mr Mills is approached to ask him if he was in a position to supply the type IIR masks.

So Mills wasn’t told to go back through the portal and offer these masks, he was asked directly if he could and they were added to the contract.

Ayanda would not not have even offered the IIR face masks had it not been provided with privileged information.

As soon as Ayanda was allocated to the VIP lane, an individual pseudonymised as “1U” put pressure on an official to deal with it as quickly as possible: “This is likely to get escalated to Ministerial level in next 20 mins or so.”

Officials sought to have Ayanda’s offers expedited due to their connection:
“I am getting a lot of escalations from this supplier, who is influential across government, on the lack of response he is getting. Can you advise what the hold up is please so we can communicate better.”

On 28 April 2020, (a Cabinet Office official who was not part of the VIP team) had completed a due diligence report on Ayanda. He gave Ayanda a “red” rating, which meant: “Major issues or concerns, these would need to be resolved before we use them”.

Yet these concerns over Ayanda were not communicated to the accounting officers who considered and approved this quarter of a billion pound contract.

'It's not permissible for the Defendant to address this by saying the decision would have been the same in any event. There is no evidence to support that and it would be surprising if they really would have continued with a supplier who failed the test for a £250m contract.'

Upon delivery, Ayanda’s FFP2 masks failed assessment by the Health and Safety Executive. As with Pestfix’s FFP2 masks, they were unusable by the NHS.

Consequently, the masks were designated as “Do Not Supply” and have not been distributed. Millions of pounds has been wasted.

ON TO PESTFIX: a supplier of “pest control supplies”.

Before 2020 it had supplied PPE for individuals using hazardous pest control products; but it had no experience at all in the provision of PPE for healthcare workers.

It was a “small company” with net assets of £18,047.

Pestfix was allocated to the VIP lane “because of a connection to Steve Oldfield, Chief Commercial Officer at the DHSC”.

An ex-director of Pestfix was an “old school friend” of Mr Oldfield’s father-in-law.

Pestfix’s privileged level of contact with the VIP team enabled it to push multiple and repeated offers of PPE, all of which were considered by officials and some of which were accepted.

They were first given a £28m coveralls contract - worth 1,554 times their net assets

Following their delivery to the UK, the coveralls were assessed by the Health and Safety Executive.

The HSE rejected the coveralls. They ought to have failed technical assurance long before that.

"The due diligence done - or not done - of Pestfix for a contract worth £30m was "manifestly insufficient". - Jason Coppel QC

The process was very murky indeed.

In relation to a gowns contract on 16 April text messages between a Government official and Pestfix reveal that Pestfix’s agent in China had secured these gowns by BRIBING local officials, which was apparently his usual practice.

The gowns were not compliant with NHS specification.

"As we understand all Chinese Standard Gowns regardless of manufacturer are not compliant..."

The @NAOorguk report out today finds there was no clear audit trail for why some companies which had low due diligence ratings were awarded contracts for PPE.

It also said greater transparency was needed in future. inews.co.uk/news/covid-rep…

On 28 April 2020 Government entered into a £143m contract with Pestfix for PPE.

- There was no advertisement for the gloves and aprons needed.

-There was no technical assurance on the gowns worth over £100 million - none at all.

It is not candid for for Government to admit nowhere in its evidence that there was no technical assurance on over £100m worth of gowns, and no appreciation that they weren’t the same gowns as had been bought previously.

"Over £100m was spent on gowns with no technical assurance, no financial due diligence + based on a misunderstanding of the gowns which were actually being purchased..."

BUT: "you will not find this in any of Government's witness statements. You will have to spend hours, as my learned junior did, to track down what happened in this case"

"We understand and accept that Government had to prioritise some supplier offers over others...The problem here is that the filter had nothing to do with the quality of the offer." - Jaspn Coppel QC

"It should have been an irrelevant consideration that the former director of Pestfix was a former school friend of Mr Oldfield’s father in law - that should not be a basis on which Pestfix was given priority." - Jason Coppel QC 🔥

🤯Government says it was rational to have a VIP Lane because it enabled civil servants to manage what one calls the "noise" of ministers harassing officials to progress the offers of their contacts.

The point is there shouldn't have been all this "noise" from ministers.

This email we've uncovered shows one official raising the alarm that: 'the resultant impact of pressure from ministers can become more of a distraction from the substantive priorities.'

And this NHS report from April 2020 identified one major risk to be that: 'VIP escalation is consuming bandwidth for progressing viable options.'